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Video Game industry fails to beat Amazon.com’s .Game

The Entertainment Software Association, a U.S. industry group for the video game industry, has failed to quash Amazon.com’s application to run the .game top level domain name.

ESA filed a community objection against Amazon’s application. There are six applicants for .game, but ESA only went after Amazon.com’s application because it proposes operating the domain as a “closed” registry. This means other companies would not be able to register second level .game domain names.

The group convinced panelist Prof. Dr. Guido Santiago Tawil that it represented a clearly delineated “Video Game Publishing Community”. But it failed to convince the panelist that .game targeted this community, nor did it show a likelihood of material detriment if Amazon.com was awarded the domain.

ESA did what a lot of community objectors have done. In order to show any sort of community, they had to go narrow. In this case, it just focused on the video game publishing industry rather than gamers. But even the video game community as a whole, as it were, is only a small segment of what could be considered a “game” community.
Amazon.com’s application didn’t mention video games at all. The panelist searched for “game” on Amazon.co.uk and found results for board games, trivia games, puzzles, travel games, etc. along with video games.

Objector merely addresses the issue by stating vaguely that if the Application is granted it will “threaten to severely hamper competition and consumer choice”. Far from describing precisely the material detriment that the Application will cause if successful, Objector fails to identify the possible harm that the community at issue would suffer if ICANN granted Amazon the exclusive operation of the “.game” gTLD.

Amazon.com still faces stiff competition, including Google, to be able to run .game.